The Director of 'A United Kingdom' on Why We Need This Movie More Than Ever

Amma Asante has proven herself a force to watch behind the camera. Her first film, 2004's A Way of Life, an indie about the events surrounding a hate crime in a public housing development in Ireland, won her a host of accolades including a BAFTA, while 2013's Belle told the little-known story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, a young woman born to a slave mother and an aristocratic father and raised amongst the upper echelons of British society. It won a BAFTA and an NAACP Image Award and introduced star Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a vital new talent.

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David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike in 'A United Kingdom'

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Unflinchingly unafraid to tackle so-called "uncomfortable" topics, Asante's lens refuses to sugarcoat conversations surrounding race, sex, social status, feminism and colonialism against backdrops such as American slavery and South African apartheid. Her latest offering, A United Kingdom, tells the so-unbelievable-it-must-be-true story of Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), the heir to the throne of British colony Bechuanaland (today Botswana), who falls in love with young Londoner Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike) while attending school in the U.K. in 1948. When the two marry against the wishes of Seretse's uncle, a dramatic attempt to exile Seretse from Bechuanaland unfolds involving the country's leaders and the British and neighboring South African governments. Alone in an unknown country, Ruth struggles to adjust to her new home and appeal to her infuriated, unwelcoming subjects, while Seretse fights to return to her and weighs the prospect of independence for his country.

As a child of Ghanian-born parents, Asante feels a particular connection to the story: "[My father] was a Pan-Africanist and he really believed in the United States of Africa," she says. "He believed Africa had a stronger voice and could become a stronger world presence as a united states. I was raised reciting the speeches of Ghana's first president." Below, the 47-year-old British director discusses how her whole family inspires her storytelling, processing the courage of Ruth and Seretse and making her voice heard as a black female director.

On imagining herself in the same scenario as her characters:

"In many ways, that's what made me want to paint them as very ordinary heroes. What I mean by that is I sort of had it. I'm married to a Dane, a Scandinavian, and we fell in love very quickly. For me, it was definitely love at first sight and I was compelled to move country and to be with him and leave everything else behind. However, I really know—and I love him with all of my heart—that I could not stand up to the pressure that Ruth and Seretse stood up to.

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Asante on set with Oyelowo

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"I think we use the term hero too often and we use the term inspirational too often. I think what is truly inspirational and truly heroic is when you see a couple or a person engaged in actions that are positive and brave and courageous that you know the majority of people around you could not mirror. They took the road less traveled, and it would've been so easy to just say, 'This is too hard. I love you so much, but this is just too hard. For your sake and for mine, we have to let this go,' and yet neither of them did, and in the end, that wasn't just positive for them, but also for their country, and I think in the end it's positive for the world, because it's a great, great example."

On how her family inspires her films:

"I was making Belle for my dad, there's no doubt, and it really was a love letter to the father/daughter relationship. I didn't know I was going to lose my dad while I was making it. He is a very direct influence on me. In A United Kingdom, he's very much there in the sense that he raised me to understand the concepts of divide and rule, and you hear that running through the film. He taught me how divide and rule works in Africa in terms of the empire, and how chiefs would be set against each other, and then the colonizers would move in to take over control. In Seretse and his uncle, you see a direct microcosm of that.

"Mostly A United Kingdom was about ensuring that all of the women had a strong [voice], that Ruth had a fully-fledged, three-dimensional story arc as a woman [and] that the black females had a voice. Even though initially they're against Ruth, we really hear that point of view, which changes, but is valid. All of those views are valid. Then making sure that Seretse, as a person of color in the story, also has not just a love story journey but also the internal, personal journey of how he was going to continue to serve his people while perhaps not being king. [And] thinking about what ideas of leadership mean: is it to rule your people and preside over them, or is it service? If it's in service, do you have to be a king? Maybe you can be a president. Maybe you can be all sorts of things. So [I was] really finding a way to internalize that without banging people over the head with it too much. Again, with Ruth's story, [I was] finding those subtle feminist ideals. I love interweaving stories of sisterhood within the works that I do, so we do see a kind of fractious relationship between her and the African women in the beginning, but you slowly start to see her stand on her own two feet and you see the courage that she has. You see how she finds her way to earn the respect of the women and even develop a sister relationship with Seretse's own sister.

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"As I was making the film, I suddenly realized that probably more than an ode to my father, this [movie] is probably an ode to my brother. David [Oyelowo] and I go back a really long way. He looks like my brother. I've known him almost two decades, and when I first came to the script, there was no Naledi in the story. The character of Seretse's sister wasn't there, and I suddenly realized that I was seeing the story of African independence for Botswana unfold through her eyes as well."

"What is truly inspirational and heroic is when you see a person engaged in actions that are positive and brave and courageous that you know the majority of people could not mirror."

On giving Seretse's aunt and sister a voice in the film:

"I knew they couldn't be in many scenes, but I wanted the scenes they were in to be powerful and hopefully, you would walk away remembering them. You feel for both, because again, both points of view are valid. From Ruth's point of view, she had no concept of what she would be coming up against. She was in that bubble of love, and genuinely came there with an open heart, not realizing the hundreds of years of tradition that she was not seeing and not recognizing. For them, they had a right to point that out to her. And I always believed that, for the real story, it must've been a journey for them to come to terms with 'This woman loves our king. She loves our country. She loves us.' I just always think that when love comes to it, somehow, it has to be able to melt hate, and it has to be able to melt discourse. That's what I try to believe in."

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On what she learned while making A United Kingdom:

"Mainly I suppose I learned how forgiving this couple were, because when I first read Susan Williams's book, The Colour Bar—which is a brilliant, brilliant piece of work, and it's the book that our film is based on—I bounced between all these emotions of being sad and wanting to cry, and then feeling frustrated, and then feeling really confused, because there were political characters in the film, British characters that I had a completely different understanding of, and a really positive understanding of, and they didn't behave in quite the way I always imagined them to in my heart. My heart would sink, and I just thought, 'My goodness, how angry this would make you!' How angry it would make me if I were placed in the situation where I was being told I couldn't love the man that I love in the country that I want to love him in.

"But the couple seemed to somehow be so much bigger than that when they were eventually allowed to be together in Bechuanaland and later Botswana. They focused on the present and the future, and that was what was able to allow them to move forward and Seretse to stand for president in the end, and do everything that he did with diamonds and the infrastructure of the country and the politics of the country [and] everything that she did as a humanitarian."

Asante on the set of 'A United Kingdom' in Botswana

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On refusing to tone down difficult topics:

"One way I try and turn being a female filmmaker who doesn't get a lot of opportunity or previously hasn't had a lot of opportunity into a positive is that I feel I have nothing to lose. If you're a guy, or even a woman, with 20 films behind you, and you know you've got a certain amount of a body of work that you want to get into a lifetime, you have a career to lose. My career is really just beginning and I'm not old, but I'm not young, and I don't know how many films I will be allowed to make before I am no longer here. So for me, it's really important to tell the stories in a way that make me feel proud to have my name at the end of them, which is why I tend to always put the credits at the end of the film and not at the beginning. I think you have to own the right to them first.

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"So yes, I'm often challenged. There were many, many challenges during the process of getting the script into a place that I wanted it in order to shoot A United Kingdom. There were many, many questions about the balance of politics and love, and to me, there was no point in telling a story that didn't have politics in it, because that is the only way you understand the power of the couple's love, to understand exactly what they stood up against and triumphed over. Everybody knew that we had to have a scene that gave voice to the black females that Ruth was supposed to become queen of, but how harsh that was was definitely a topic of conversation.

"There was one viewpoint that [said] the journey of independence that is woven into the story—as opposed to an addendum at the end of the story that it could've been—was not really necessary because African people hadn't really started to think about independence in 1947, and they just accepted things the way that they were, [like when Ruth] sees [the sign] 'whites only,' that was just something Seretse would've accepted. I said, 'Whoa. Being the child of African parents, I can tell you in 1947, there were thoughts of independence. India had just achieved independence, and made that a real, tangible possibility for the African countries and the continent.' Those conversations were very, very much there. Many of the politicians who then walked their countries to independence in Africa were being educated in the U.K. at the time and were moving in the same circles, so I can be real sure that those conversations were being had.

Asante on the set of 2013's 'Belle' with stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw and James Norton

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"In Belle, I remember having questions put to me as to whether she would be likable because she arched her back so much, and she asked so many questions. 'Wasn't I making her a dislikable character?' And I said, 'Well, she's not asking for anything more than equality.' She's very privileged, that's true. She has more than the average white person had at that time in Georgian England, but what she didn't have was equality in her own home, and that's something that we all have a right to, and by her exploring that or questioning that, I don't know that that should make her dislikable.

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"You're constantly negotiating these issues, and with Belle, that was very much my film. The film that I just finished, Where Hands Touch with Amandla Stenberg, is very much my film. With A United Kingdom, you come onboard and there's already a team there, and you can't call anybody's bluff. You have to put your case forward, and if they don't like it, they fire you. That's just the way it works."

"I always think that when love comes to it, somehow, it has to be able to melt hate."

"It's so, so hard. I remember a long time ago—probably about a decade ago, at the very beginning of my career—being on a panel in Cannes with some incredibly powerful Hollywood women and being asked the question of, 'How do you move forward in a world that is structured to not give you opportunity?' I remember all of us standing there before we got up on the panel thinking, 'Oh, my goodness. How do we answer this question?' Because what all of us had done was deliberately, somehow, made ourselves blind to the challenges in order to be able to negotiate them, to a certain extent.

"I know that when I think about the [numbers], they make me not want to get out of bed. They make me so despondent that literally—despite the fact that I've now made three films in four years—it is difficult for me to move to the desk, sit down and start typing and start trying to create another story, because, to be very honest, you just think, where is this gonna go? Is this gonna land anywhere? Who is gonna understand it? Can I fight the good fight that I just described to you to tell this story in the way that I want to tell it?

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"And so the only way is to, on the one hand, ignore it. What I try to do, however, is when I am given an opportunity, and there are some incredible people in this industry [like] Rick McCallum, who is also a producer alongside David Oyelowo on this film. I wasn't going to get fired from A United Kingdom as far as Rick was concerned. It was just, 'You know what, we brought you on board for your vision. Do what you need to do.' And despite the fact that there were conversations, in the end, it was, 'Give Amma what she needs.' And so there are some incredible feminists who are both male and female. I don't want to call them progressive people because that implies they're ahead of where we need to be, but they're right where we need to be to recognize why it makes no sense to silence the voice of talented people from any section of society, because you just squeeze the lifeblood [out] of an industry. They recognize that, so whenever one of them collaborates with me or allows an opening for me to step through, I have committed to trying to the do the same for an aspiring female who is coming up, whether she be black or whether she be white. I always try to put a big emphasis on women of color because we know that's particularly where the dearth is, even within the context of a lack of opportunity for women in general. They come and shadow me on the films I make. I know I can't teach them how to make a film in a few days or a few weeks, but what I can teach them to feel is what leadership feels like. What it feels like to have your ideas challenged every single day as you make a movie, and how you stand up to that, and how you hold onto a vision, and how you negotiate a pathway to ensuring that vision ends up on screen, because I think that once you get the job, that's the biggest challenge.

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Asante at the New York premiere of 'A United Kingdom'

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"On the other hand, at the same time, I've had to kind of counsel myself to understand that I cannot receive my value through a system of juries or academies that choose not to recognize what I do, because again, I wouldn't get out of bed. I have to find my value through the connection that I make with audiences and being able to talk to them through journalists like yourself who give me that opportunity.

"Overall, that doesn't help directly, but what I hope that means is that I end up putting out a body of work that will eventually make a difference, that other female directors of color and of all sorts of backgrounds will do the same, and eventually if we don't give up, that will make a difference. I think one day, I don't know how many hundreds of years we're gonna have to wait, but I do think one day we're gonna look back and really understand how un-evolved we were in this period, where we really do believe that it makes sense to have the majority of films be told through a very similar gaze time after time, and that we aren't offering audiences that variety of storytelling that they deserve."

"I cannot receive my value through a system of juries or academies that choose not to recognize what I do. I have to find my value through the connection I make with audiences."

On the art she loved this year:

"I would definitely say Moonlight. I'm so rooting for Barry Jenkins and everybody involved. I think that was not just an incredible piece of work, but incredibly courageous, incredibly necessary. I just feel completely proud and my heart bursts with pride in terms of everybody connected to that film. I love Stranger Things and The Leftovers. We just stole one of their actors in Christopher Eccleston, who is a Brit. I just used him in Where Hands Touch.

"Susan Williams's book The Colour Bar wasn't this year but it's just been re-released for our film. That book is just incredible. If anybody loves the film, they should definitely read the book, because there's so much that I would've loved to have in the film that I couldn't, because you have under two hours to tell a story. The painstaking research that Susan put into it—she tells the story in a way that's not dry but somehow allows this incredible story to unfold."

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